AKS vs EKS for a Small DevOps Team: Which One Is Actually Cheaper and Easier to Run?

Azure Kubernetes Service and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service offer broadly equivalent, CNCF-conformant Kubernetes capabilities, making an organization’s existing cloud footprint, identity system, skills, commitments, and networking needs more important than nominal service differences. Both charge about $0.10 per cluster hour for production control planes, although AKS provides a no-SLA free tier for non-production; in practice, compute, NAT gateways, load balancers, cross-availability-zone traffic, egress, and logging typically dominate costs, with AWS cross-AZ transfer and Azure log ingestion highlighted as potential surprises. AKS may be simpler for teams already using Microsoft Entra ID and Azure tooling, while EKS better fits AWS-centric teams despite a steeper IAM, IRSA, and workload-identity learning curve; EKS also benefits from Karpenter, whereas AKS’s Azure CNI Overlay can reduce pod IP exhaustion concerns. Neither service eliminates ongoing operational work such as Kubernetes upgrades, node patching, add-on compatibility, RBAC administration, observability, backups, and cost optimization, so small teams are advised to enable automated modes, use infrastructure-as-code and GitOps, and consider developer self-service platforms or internal developer platforms. The recommended practical approach is to select the cloud already supported by organizational skills and commitments, automate operations aggressively, plan networking and identity choices carefully, and focus effort on reducing developer-facing and day-two management burdens.

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